


Digimon Mystery Dungeon: The Undying Dynasty

by Astaraile



Category: Digimon - All Media Types, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
Genre: (but it's done by Digimon), (so they don't know what they're doing), Archaeology, Digital World, Mild Language, Uses elements of Mystery Dungeon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:07:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29775252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astaraile/pseuds/Astaraile
Summary: Libby, a human-turned-Salamon, wakes up burning alive in a desert. Becoming an amateur Digi-archaeologist alongside an invention-loving BlackGaomon and a cheerful Labramon, she uncovers the legend of a tyrant deposed near the Genesis of the Digital World—and discovers he may not be as long-gone as everyone believes. A Digimon fic with aspects of Mystery Dungeon threaded into it.
Kudos: 1





	Digimon Mystery Dungeon: The Undying Dynasty

When Libby first woke up, she thought she was on fire. She half-crawled, half-wormed her way out of the sun, carving sloppy breaststrokes through sand like she was cresting a wave instead of a dune.

Her forehead bumped into a hard wall. Dark shapes cut through the glare. She blinked once, twice. Three—no, two rocks huddled close around her.

 _Where... am I?_ Even though she'd found a patch of shade, Libby's body still boiled. A quick look around answered her question.

She'd been dumped into a continent-sized desert. Yellow, orange, and brown all layered themselves on top of each other under an impossibly-blue sky. Clusters of flat-faced rocks, tiered like sepia wedding cakes, popped out every few dunes.

Libby blinked again. An upside-down pyramid broke the horizon, balanced like an arrowhead stabbed into the ground. How was that physically possible? Scratch that, how did she even get here?

 _… Wait a minute._ She rubbed her eyes. Why was she seeing everything so clearly without her glasses? That wasn't the only strange thing she noticed, either. Instead of a nose and the tops of her cheeks, the edges of something round and fuzzy jutted into her vision.

_Wait, what!?_

Libby felt her face up and down. It wasn't just her glasses that had disappeared: her hair had, too. Short-cropped fur bristled in its place, shifting like wheat in a field wherever she patted it. Flaps of skin replaced her ears. Her forehead was bigger than she remembered, almost dome-shaped. Her eyes were even larger, taking in so much more _detail_.

And her hands—paws?—didn't even have individual fingers. She knew she should feel digits there, but it was impossible to feel past the edge of her feet. How?

 _I must be dreaming._ It was the obvious answer: this was just too strange to be real. _Oh, maybe it's a lucid dream!_ Hope flared in her chest. Now that she knew, couldn't Libby manipulate her dream into whatever she wanted?

Libby focused on her fuzzy feet, imagining them morphing into hands. Nothing happened.

She screwed up her face, squeezed her eyes shut, and chanted to herself. "Human body, human body, human body!"

Nothing. If she had blood vessels, she would've popped one.

… Come to think of it, the heat and the sand had burned her. Her eyes still ached. Dreams didn't have pain, did they?

 _Okay, so maybe I'm heat-sick and hallucinating._ That didn't explain why she was out here in the first place. She didn't live anywhere near a desert.

After ruling out a coma (last Libby remembered, she'd fallen asleep in bed; she wasn't in any kind of accident) and being in hell (no way was she creative enough to come up with this), she had no choice but to start moving. No matter what she tried, the world never changed. Eventually, she had to stop asking questions and start surviving.

Libby was good at that.

Step 1: figure out how to walk on all fours. The desert winds wouldn't carry her on their own. That meant walking back out of the welcome shade of the rocks. It took three tries to stand up without her hind legs giving out. She ended up hugging one of the stone spires like some kind of dog-monkey.

"Hot-hot-hot…" Libby cantered like a pony at first, fighting to stay upright in the sinking sand. The faster she switched feet, the less time they spent roasting. How did fennec foxes do it? She could feel a dehydration headache coming on already.

As she practiced limping— _right front-left back foot, left front-right back foot_ —she flopped onto something that crunched beneath her weight. "… Uh oh." It was the sound her glasses had made when she accidentally walked on them in the shower last year. She'd spent an hour pulling out all the glass shards.

The carapace of a gold-and-white gadget glittered up at her. It was shaped like an egg with wings, and could've fit in the palm of her hand if she had one. Libby reached out to press one of its buttons, but thanks to the size of her paw, smashed all three of them at once. Its screen lit up with a frenzied rainbow of glitches.

It gargled something that, with some artistic license, might be called words. "Shhhlmn. Ffw vnent."

Oh no. She could see some sand grains stuck behind the cracked screen… Libby leaned closer. "Hello? Anybody there?" Another few snippets of gibberish ran a saw blade across her eardrums. Of _course_ she broke the one thing she had with her in this nightmare. Just her luck.

Libby's gaze moved from it to the pyramid. Useless or not, she'd found it where she woke up. It _had_ to be important, right? Maybe if she found some humans, she could get somebody to fix it. Picking it up in her teeth, she started Step 2: get to the pyramid. A monument of that size had to have been built by someone intelligent.

The sun kept up a careful pace behind Libby as she stumbled towards the horizon. Her vision blurred, and her ankles swelled. The pyramid grew larger and larger.

Eventually, her careful hops slowed to foot-dragging plods. A dull headache pulsed like a thunderhead around her temples. When she spotted a club-shaped lump of spikes, she almost collapsed with relief.

Cacti were plants, and plants needed moisture to survive. She'd seen TV shows and books where desert dwellers drank cactus water to stay hydrated… while sometimes hallucinating from it, which wasn't ideal in this situation.

Then again, even if it _did_ make her see things, how much weirder could this world get?

The potential hallucinogenic properties of cactus juice aside, how was she going to get to it? It wasn't like she could cut off a chunk and use it as a bowl. She couldn't use her glitchy doodad as a machete, and her blobby paws were about as sharp as a wet bar of soap. That left Libby with one choice.

She wasn't expecting the cactus's arm to be as hard as a PVC pipe under her teeth. No matter how much she gnawed, she didn't even make a dent.

 _What's this thing_ _ **made**_ _out of!?_ Two more tries later, twisting her head so her back molars could dig into the cactus's iron flesh, Libby's jaws ached. Pain burrowed into her gums from the spines she'd ignored; a thick fluid pooled on her tongue. When she tried to claw it out with one of her dough-paws, she choked on a squeak. That was _not_ blood. _Blood_ wasn't chunky with cyan squares. _I'm losing my mind. This doesn't make sense. This can't…_

"Kffwlmn," the device at her feet commented. "Drwlnmn." If Libby had the leg strength, she would've punted it into the sunset. _Thanks. Very insightful._

At first, she thought the device had laughed at her misery—but, she realized as she whipped around, she'd been found by a pair of blob-creatures. They looked nothing like any animal she knew. One was bullet-shaped and blunt-faced, clad in purple-and-white fur twice as thick as hers. The other looked like a legless pink tomato with a massive, craggy mouth.

If it was possible, Libby's cheeks heated up even more. "What, you think this is funny!?" They skittered away from her when she shouted, kicking up dust clouds. It occurred to her that, rude or not, yelling at the first sign of sapient life she'd seen in minutes (hours?) wasn't the smartest move she could've made. "W-Wait! Come back! I didn't mean it! I needed—oof!"

Tripping over her own feet, she rolled down the dune in a heap. She earned a mouthful of sand for her troubles. On the bright side, it might clot her gums.

A trio of serpentine dragons with red wings soared far above her head. She watched from on her back, eyes rolling to the top of her head, as they vanished from sight.

She was close enough to pick out individual bricks in the pyramid now. There was an end in sight. Her eyes closed, and her head fell slack.

 _Just a moment of rest,_ Libby assured herself. _Just a moment and I'll walk again._ A moment stretched into a minute, an hour… a…

* * *

Three moons hung in the sky: one white, one yellow, and one pink. An upside-down pyramid stabbed into the sand, nailing its shadow to Defrag Desert.

A grappling hook arced across the sky like a shooting star. It sailed over the top of the pyramid and dragged itself back, skidding to a stop at its edge.

One arm's length at a time, Gao clambered up to the top. The glider dangling from his shoulders made seeing where he was going difficult. Its pointed nose cracked against the bricks, and he flinched. If he wasn't careful, he was going to break it before his test run could even begin.

He'd cobbled the glider together out of everything he could find: tarps from town were dyed into black wings, the frame was a jumble of wood and spineless Digi-cacti limbs—and he lashed it all together with ropes and dreams. (And maybe a Dokugumon's sticky thread he'd paid far, _far_ too much for.)

He wanted his first flight to be from the top of the pyramid. It was the tallest point for miles around, and the flat top gave him plenty of room for a running start. Ambitious? Maybe. Dangerous? Probably. Worth it? Yggdrasil, he hoped so.

Once he'd given the glider a once-over, Gao looked for a smooth stretch of moonlit bricks to run across. He squeezed the handlebar into the palm of his gloves. "You're gonna sink," a Xiaomon chirped, fluffy white head popping out of his bag. He rolled his eyes. "Like a rock."

"Stop it, Abbie."

Three steps back. It wobbled over his head, and he squared his shoulders. He'd be going where no BlackGaomon had gone before. Wind billowed under the glider, jerking against his arms,

pulling him up,

and he was airborne.

Sheets pulled taut around his body. The only way he could tell where his wings ended and the sky began was the stars.

"Who's sinking like a rock now!?" he yelled over the winds.

He could hear her laughing by his ear. "You're doing it! You're doing it!" she cheered.

The dunes blurred and became almost spherical under his feet, and for a moment, he felt like he was flying around the world.

It didn't last.

Fabric tore loose from the frame on his left wing. He felt the exact moment the glider stopped supporting his weight.

"Bail!" Abbie yelped. Gao's paws opened, and the handlebar knocked against his thumb as he toppled free. His stomach didn't fall with him.

He registered sensations in blinks. The snap of the rudder breaking in two. The rush of a faceful of grit and dust as he made impact. The stab of his knee pushing up into his own gut. And then, for a moment that felt longer than it really was, he sat there.

Small paws shook his shoulder, and he tugged his head up. Maroon eyes glittered above him. "Hey, you okay?"

"I'm fine!" he assured Abbie.

The glider was not.

Gao's head drooped. A sigh blew sand in a mushroom cloud around his face. Alas, the breeze wouldn't wait for him to come to terms with his own mistakes. He tracked down the broken rudder, trying in vain to slide the halves back together. They'd fractured too messily for that.

_And I'm all out of Dokugumon thread. This bites._

Some of that annoyance faded when Gao spotted something gold in the sand. His eyes lit up. "Ooh, sweet!"

Digging up random items was common in Defrag, where half the caravans that slogged through it lost a piece of cargo. It didn't look like Digimon technology. Was it human-made? He stuffed it in his bag for safe-keeping.

"Hey, Gao, look! Somebody's down there!" Abbie's pink paw poked over his shoulder, and he followed it like an arrow.

Gao's DigiCore thudded in his chest. Occasionally, those random items still had a traveler attached to them. It was usually a sign things had gone very, very wrong.

He dragged a half-buried Digimon out by their stub-tail, brushing away the leftover flecks of data dripping from their mouth. From their sized, he guessed they were roughly Rookie-level like him. They didn't smell like either a Virus or a Vaccine. It was the floppy ears and short snout that clued him in. "A Salamon?"

"Looks like the Free-attribute kind," Abbie commented. She tapped the side of her own neck. "No Holy Ring."

Maybe this venture wasn't a failure after all. "We need to get them back to town! Who knows how long they've been stuck out here?" Chewing his lip, Gao peered over at the pyramid. "Maybe if we…"

A low groan broke through Gao's thoughts. On instinct, his paws clenched themselves into fists—but the yellow lump didn't move. They were still alive!

He shimmied the Salamon onto the half-broken glider, turning it into a makeshift sled. He grimaced when wood slats creaked and groaned, but he had no other choice. The repairs would have to wait.

"Alright." Shouldering the glider's handle, Gao set his sights on the pyramid doors. "Let's get you out of here…"

 _A/N: A quick disclaimer_ — _if you're ever stranded in a desert, don't actually drink cactus water. Unlike what the movies tell you, it's not actually safe._

_The unidentified Digimon mentioned this chapter: Dorimon and Koromon - the Digimon that laughed at Libby; Airdramon - the trio of dragon Digimon that flew over Libby's head._


End file.
